1 billion dollars moved from BTC wallets

Large movements of bitcoin continue, corresponding to 1.51% of all BTCs currently in circulation.

After the 66,000 BTCs moved on Monday, a further 260,000 BTCs were moved in total, corresponding to more than a billion dollars.

This time, however, it wasn’t a single transaction, but a series of three transactions, very similar to each other, which have moved a total of 263,294 BTC.

A different reason for these movements has been hypothesized, which could be linked to Coinbase maintenance work resulting in an update.

“Over the next seven days, Coinbase will be running scheduled maintenance across our platform that may cause movements on all Coinbase-supported blockchains. These are controlled, closely monitored movements that are being performed in order to provide enhanced security and protection for our customers”.

The reasons for linking the two phenomena are the timing (the announcement of Coinbase took place on December 4th), and the nature of the transactions, in addition to the fact that at this time the fees are very low.

Moreover, these transactions were divided into smaller amounts so that they can be managed more easily in cold wallets and move funds to new SegWit addresses.

This is only a hypothesis resulting from an arbitrary interpretation of the connection between the announcement of Coinbase and the timing of the transactions. It was also supported by the fact that in the past similar dynamics had already occurred with the involvement of other exchanges.

Given the current very low value of bitcoin, this could be the ideal time to invest some BTC to perform maintenance work on the large wallets that require transactions on the blockchain.

In other words, those who hold large quantities of bitcoins on their wallets could be encouraged by the currently very low costs to make large transactions in order to better organize their management of BTCs.

This hypothesis seems to be confirmed by the fact that many of the addresses from which these transactions are being sent are old addresses that haven’t been active for years and therefore may require maintenance.

Similar movements also occurred during the prolonged period of suffering of the bitcoin price between 2014 and 2015, which would confirm that the times when the price remains very low would be ideal for large transactions related to wallet maintenance.